It does seem to play very well on an Octane 300mhz, and visually look better than other compiles/versions I have used.. but it does not play many games (at least ones I tried). It does play pacman though.. and in a 1920x1200 resolution desktop it looks good and is fast. Just need it to play more games.

run as ./sdlmame -w -video opengl it will find roms under the /roms/ in your current dir.

launch.jpg (34.19 KiB) Viewed 833 times

game.jpg (80.73 KiB) Viewed 833 times

However, all the other xmame binaries i have found through nekochan may play more games.. but the sound seems to go 1/2 speed.. so speach and music are sloooweed and deeper sounding. gameplay is not to bad with those. I tried messing with the sound freq/rates but no luck. I havent tried it on a faster machine yet.

The port is not difficult. It's pretty straight-forward, and I think I did it over the course of two days (it's really just dealing with GCC-isms and the macros used by the newer versions of this compiler). The issue is, building the damn thing takes about two days on my 2x600 Octane. That's the fastest SGI I have. Somebody with an awesome Origin could probably crunch through this in a few hours.

Now, here's the opinion part --

You may not *want* the latest MAME/MESS. I don't fully understand their development cycle, or how they hash the ROMs, but all of this seems to be in a state of constant flux (ie. - running a random ROM set will usually result in fail. Somewhere along the line, they changed either the expected ROM format or the hash values of the ROMs.)

Now, I have a great version of 0.88, working on my Octane. This is an "older" version of this software. It's newer than anything on Neko besides the 0.149, but it works better, doesn't suffer from the Neogeo/SEGA arcade endianess issues, and works perfectly with any ROMs I've thrown at it. I have the OpenGL renderer working like the 0.149 port, and the MESS port works, too (ie. you can play NES games on your SGI). It doesn't leave me wanting for a newer version, for now -- it runs like it's supposed to.

The 0.88 version is somewhat important, but I don't want to disrespect Neko's ToS for this forum. You can read between the lines on this.

If this is of interest, I can package this up for Nekoware. Just let me know -- and please do so in a day or so. I'm not always near my SGI's now.

Only Neko can move stuff from /incoming to /beta and /incoming is not browseable, but if you specify what name it can be found in that folder, we can retrieve it.

PS: I agree with MAME and MESS increasingly becoming a movable target. They have integrated MESS into MAME since 0162, which massively bloats compile time. and i only checked certain old roms like Galaga for compatibility with the latest mame 0168.You can build subtargets with MAME. You only need to make a driver list and a .lua script for specifying all necessary drivers in your subtarget: cpus, audio, video, machines and buses, and that's a bit of an art. I did manage to succeed in isolating all necessary files, but only after building it for at least a dozen times.

There is a lot of development stuff going on right now, especially in the SGI section. MooglyGuy (aka Ryan) is now trying to put in skeleton drivers for old SGI hardware, together with the PROM dumps.MAME 0169 now has the Indigo R3000 as skeleton driver!

I will be playing with this alot more in the coming days - btw what is the correct versioning for these files? they all seem to say 0.78.1 but then xmame.xgl also says GLmame 0.94?

either way xmame.xgl works great so far! everything i tried so far has run full speed with sound: neogeo, CPS1, CPS2it seems to even work great with the gxmame frontend I compiled! viewtopic.php?f=15&t=16729470#p7377856

I had to disable effects thought

I haven't messed with xmess yet, I really will need to learn how to use it, but I smell a virgin run of Zelda Outlands on NES happening soon...

so far the GXMame frontend has been working great, but I still can't seem to figure out which version of xmame this is - seems it likes to report .78!

For my monitor, I set the options in GXmame to gamma .70, brightness to 1.0, really helped the colors. effects has to be set to 0, seems there is a bug.

This xmame.xgl has been playing everything i threw at it full speed, I've been using a completed mame 1.03 set I found online. so I'd say it would make a great addition to neko tardist! So far the only thing I have found that I have not been able to get to work are vector games

If anyone else gave the GXmame frontend a spin and found it useful perhaps I can look into making a tardist of it also